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Government United States

Stockton Basic Income Program Extended. Is Support For the Idea Growing? (newyorker.com) 110

A $500-a-month basic-income program in Stockton, California will be extended through 2021 "in response to the economic strain put on participants by the coronavirus pandemic," reports the New Yorker: While the idea of extending the program had been under discussion even before the spread of COVID-19, Stockton's mayor, Michael Tubbs told me that current conditions made doing so a "moral imperative," as many participants have lost work, and those classified as essential workers face increased risk. "COVID-19 has put the focus on the fact that a lot of Americans live in constant moments of economic disruption, because the fundamentals of the economy haven't been working," he told me.... Tubbs first encountered the concept of a universal basic income, or U.B.I., while he was an undergraduate at Stanford, in 2009, in a course that covered Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s advocacy for the idea late in his life... Tubbs told me that he doesn't see a basic income as particularly radical but, instead, as "this generation's extension of the safety net," following in the path of things like Social Security, child-labor laws, weekends, and collective bargaining...

[D]uring the pandemic, the percentage of money that participants spent on food, consistently the largest category, reached nearly twenty-five per cent over the monthly average, while the amount spent on recreation dropped to less than two per cent. Participants have also put the money toward rent, car payments, and paying off debt, as well as one-off expenses for themselves or their children: dental surgery, a prom dress, football camp, and shoes. They've also been able to cut back on working second and third jobs; one participant, a forty-eight-year-old mother of two who works full time at Tesla, was able to stop working as a delivery driver for DoorDash. Alcohol and tobacco have accounted for less than one per cent of spending per month...

Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford University, told me that the bipartisan support for [America's] Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act marked a significant shift in thinking about cash transfers... Recent calls for U.B.I. have mostly come from Silicon Valley, where libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs embraced the concept as a quick fix for job losses due to increased automation. According to Burns, the current crisis has shifted the focus away from hypothetical disasters toward inequities that already exist. In her view, the automation argument is primarily a distraction, but "if worrying about A.I. helps people look around and think about what's already under way, that's good."

Stockton's goal "was always to promote the adoption of basic-income programs on a state or federal level," according to the article, and they're now being "flooded with requests for advice from pilot programs in development in other cities, including Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Newark, Nashville, and New Orleans."

Mayor Tubbs tells them its prospects as a federal program depend mostly on political will — since "This country has a history of finding ways to pay for things that we say matter."
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Stockton Basic Income Program Extended. Is Support For the Idea Growing?

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  • So if the average naysayer is right, there must be absolutely no work getting done in Stockton since no one will work if they can otherwise get money for free... So why are they extending it? They aren't having trouble finding people to do work?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I see the value in a basic income being the same as the buffer rich people have. They can take a breather from life if shit goes sideways, collect themselves, and move on. Working class people don't have the savings to do that. We have a pandemic right now. If everyone had some real savings--or a buffer like basic income--we could probably have just waited it out. We have such extreme wealth available, but only in theory, because it's hoarded by a tiny, tiny fraction of the population who have a religious f

      • Re:Naysayers.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @07:38PM (#60305513)

        If everyone had some real savings--or a buffer like basic income--we could probably have just waited it out.

        Heres the thing. There are people that make $25K a year and have savings and investments. There are people that make $200K a year and are in debt up to their eyeballs.

        The people "that need the most help" are the people that live as high-on-the-hog as their means allows. They have a higher standard of living than the average person within their own income bracket.

        Now, we propose to give these people with higher than average standards of living, living as high-on-the-hog as possible, more, and we propose doing so by taking money from people with a less than average standard of living who responsibly do not live as high-on-the-hog as possible.

        How about you fucks with these ideas use your fucking brains.

        • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          There are almost no people with $25k in income with appreciable savings and investments. 2/3 off the top goes to rent. The remaining 1/3 is split between everything else. Maybe the single person living in Mom's basement could manage to save while making $25k, because they have no housing costs, but real humans can't.

          UBI will help some bad people. And lots of good people.

          Conservative: Kill everyone to avoid helping a single bad person.

          Liberalism: Help everyone, even if they might not be a good perso
          • There are almost no people with $25k in income with appreciable savings and investments. 2/3 off the top goes to rent.

            You just proved what a fucking ignorant and myopic fuck you are.

            You in California? That would explain it. You fucks have no idea what the rest of the country is like. You just imagined that the entire fucking country pays at least $1387/mo in rent.

            Thats your ignorant and myopic imagination. I pay rather high rent in my area, and its UNDER FUCKING $800/mo

            You are wrong, because you are ignorant, and you are ignorant, because you are myopic.

            • by ixidor ( 996844 )
              thats about $720/mo after taxes and rent. take away power, internet, cell phone, maybe insurance on a beater, and you are left with say $400. you would spend a good chunk of that on just food. whats left? how do you do ... stuff? how do you save. yeah evan at $800/mo rent and 25k/year you still arnt saving unless you eat only cat food.
              • by quall ( 1441799 )

                Absolutely right. At 25k, you aren't saving if you are buying expensive cell phones, nice TVs, services like Netflix, the best internet speeds for gaming, and any other creature comforts. Those are supposed to be incentives to try and build a career or to make more money. You can still save at 25k, but people would rather live above their means no matter what they make.

                • by sjames ( 1099 )

                  Cell phone is not a luxury these days, nor is internet. You need those to get a job. Then there's other wxpenses like clothes (Most employers frown at nudity in the workplace).

                  • by quall ( 1441799 )

                    A $600+ cell phone with an unlimited data plan, and a 50+mbps internet connection is most definitely a luxury. There are budget phones and very cheap internet connections, but low-income people are not buying those. They're buying expensive phones that are above their income level and then they're paying for them through high-priced service contracts.

            • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
              I'll give you a hint. The "AK" in my username doesn't stand for California. It's a rural red state.
          • Conservative: Kill everyone to avoid helping a single bad person.

            Liberalism: Help everyone, even if they might not be a good person.

            Yeah man just a few days ago I had a friendly debate with a Republican leaning coworker and it pretty much came down to this. He freely acknowledges that he just cannot stomach the idea that some small percentage of people might game the system and "sit on their asses all day and take his money." Funnily he's even of the mind that if we could create some perfect system to prevent that, he'd be just fine going "full communist" as he says.

            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              Funny thing is there are already plenty of people sitting on their asses all day taking his money. They have a lot more money than he has.

              • LOL I said nearly the same thing and also "well we've already got socialism, do you want socialism that benefits the rich or socialism that benefits the poor?"

        • Re:Naysayers.. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Sabriel ( 134364 ) on Sunday July 19, 2020 @01:27AM (#60306205)

          "The people "that need the most help" are the people that live as high-on-the-hog as their means allows. They have a higher standard of living than the average person within their own income bracket."

          No, the people who need the most help are the people who did the right thing, saved up, had a stroke of bad luck eat those savings, and then a second dose of bad luck shat on them while they were already staggering and knocked them on their arse.

          Which happens a damn sight more than people tend to think, because they don't really comprehend statistics or large populations.

          "Now, we propose to give these people with higher than average standards of living, living as high-on-the-hog as possible, more, and we propose doing so by taking money from people with a less than average standard of living who responsibly do not live as high-on-the-hog as possible."

          No, UBI is so all the poor sods with fuck-all discretionary income to put into savings, and/or anyone who gets shat on before they can recover from the last time they got shat on, have a better buffer between them and getting long-term fucked in the wallet - something that is inevitable on a national scale and a problem which can and does snowball into dragging down others. The current mess of social security systems are both shit at dealing with this and easily manipulated by lobbyists who want to shove their snouts into the trough.

          We need something better. "But wah someone'll rort it" is a pathetic appeal to status quo when the status quo is already being rorted, and rorted hard.

        • Looking for hook up with a stranger! Ready for any experiments! --==>>> bit.do/fGFiG
    • Basic income doesn't keep all people from working, just a large number of them.

      And Stockton isn't giving this money to everyone that lives in Stockton, and they aren't funding it with money collected only from people in Stockton. So whatever the results of the test, it doesn't actually test the viability of UBI.

      • Ok well then a bad test is a bad test and no point discussing it.
      • by BranMan ( 29917 )

        "it doesn't actually test the viability of UBI"

        I figured that out as soon as I saw the "less than 1% spent on alcohol and tobacco". So no carton a day smokers in the study group? No broken down alcoholics living on the street? All fine upstanding citizens carefully screened beforehand to put the best spin possible on this little experiment.

        So tell me again how this has anything to do with UBI (emphasis on the U)?

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @07:38PM (#60305509)

    UBI is a good idea but it's only really come about out of necessity. If the labors of the member of our society been rewarded properly then this kind of thing would be outlandish. However, with 90% of the wealth in the nation belonging to 1% of the population, here we are. UBI comes as a result of a failing economic system, not a successful one.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Dependency is a wretched condition.

        That's hilarious coming from someone like you. If you aren't living in the woods alone and hunting game then you are deeply dependent on the rest of society which includes a large number of government services which are vital to our survival.

        I wish you could understand the absurdity your statement. Cooperation is a large part of what has made humans more than mere beasts.

        • Dependency is a wretched condition.

          That's hilarious coming from someone like you. If you aren't living in the woods alone and hunting game then you are deeply dependent on the rest of society which includes a large number of government services which are vital to our survival.

          I wish you could understand the absurdity your statement. Cooperation is a large part of what has made humans more than mere beasts.

          Yes, we are deeply dependant on the rest of society...who are actually performing vital services and being compensated accordingly.

          That's how this whole thing works. You start giving people free money, you undermine the whole thing. "The Whole Thing(tm)" being the single most successful system for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to succeed...ever. Like in the history of humanity "ever".

          Seems like a bad idea to me, but this year has been full of those. Guess it's time we learn some painfu

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Trading with others on a voluntary and mutually beneficial basis has nothing to do with capitalism

            FTFY. The best way to win that game is to fuck everyone else over by leveraging economic power to make giving you money as involuntary as possible while giving them as little benefit as possible. That's why you see so much rent seeking.

            That was almost clever! Good for you, leftard!

            Brilliant argument, great insight. That should be the foreword in your book.

          • Trading with others on a voluntary and mutually beneficial basis has nothing to do with living on the dole, and you know it full well.

            It's also not what I'm talking about. Streets, police, fire departments, schools, water treatment plants and many other things are all paid for by taxes. Society benefits from these things.

            Also, when things go bad (like huge economic downturn during a pandemic) then you need to provide people with the necessities for living. UBI provides this but strips out the complexity distribution.

            Look around any inner city where multi-generational public relief is the norm.

            Much of that as actually are result of the current system that is not paying people properly. It's my opinion that if yo

      • So I take it you're living off the land and don't engage in any kind of economic interaction with anyone?

    • TANSTAAFL. For UBI to be a good idea, it has to increase the overall (and thus average per capita) productivity of the country. Possible ways it can do this are by reducing crime (those on marginal incomes are less likely to resort to crime), or delaying catastrophic effects of personal financial emergencies (e.g. a medical emergency doesn't result in you foreclosing on your home).

      On the flip side, a UBI could lower overall productivity (people on a UBI are less inclined to work, so generate less product
      • And IMHO the biggest culprit there is the availability and proclivity of regular people to take out loans to buy things. Primarily housing, where you're bidding against other people on the price of a house.....If you borrow $100k @ 4% interest on a 30 year mortgage, by the time you've paid it off you've paid $72k in interest to the 1%.

        Your math doesn't reflect reality, and is simplified to the point of being useless.

        First that $100k in property is probably worth $200k by the end of that 30 year period. Property ownership is the fastest way to grow wealth for most people. And it's a way to build generational wealth, because once it's paid off the property or its value can be passed down to your children.

        Second, over that 30 year period you would have been renting if you weren't buying. And you'd have been paying that $72k in interest to t

      • by imidan ( 559239 )

        For UBI to be a good idea, it has to increase the overall (and thus average per capita) productivity of the country. [...] On the flip side, a UBI could lower overall productivity (people on a UBI are less inclined to work, so generate less productivity). I can see it going either way, and I'm genuinely curious if it would work.

        I see this as the most important question about UBI. It's not about whether 'undeserving' people get 'free' money, or whether some people waste it. It's about whether or not it has a

    • I know people who make 200K and live paycheck to paycheck, and I know people living on 40K who have savings. It's not really a problem of the amount of income, but rather, whether the expenses are less than income. Many people at many levels of income fail to understand this.

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      Everything going to the top is natural, it's called a feedback. Just look at humans. We've just about monopolized the earth from all other non-microbial creatures.We need some amount of feedback because "smarter" people will make better decisions with their resources that will typically benefit others more than less smart people. But at the same time, having an unchecked system allows economic monopolies that abuse their powers. And this needs to be balanced by having some mechanism for large social project
      • Everything going to the top is natural, it's called a feedback.
        We need some amount of feedback because "smarter" people will make better decisions with their resources that will typically benefit others more than less smart people.

        There are plenty of people that got rich not from intellect but rather fortuitous circumstance. It has been studied and there is no correlation between intellect and wealth.

  • Probably, because the average person is short-sighted and rather dumb when it comes to things like economics. All they see is 'tax free money from the government' and they go 'woohoo!' and are all over it. Nevermind what it does to the economy, never mind that it's not in any way shape or form sustainable, never mind that it's a honey-trap they're being lured into, and never mind that in a few generations of living on 'free government money', no one will even think about things like an education or a career
    • Never mind that UBI has been written about in positive terms by some of the most respected and successful entrepreneurs since the beginning of the Industrial Age. They must all be idiots whilst you are a genius.
      • blah blah blah WORDS

        Same shit, different day. Heard it all before. None of it matters. Stupid idea, stupid people. Blah, blah, blah.

        • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

          Same shit, different day. Heard it all before. None of it matters. Stupid idea, stupid people. Blah, blah, blah.

          Indeed. These damn libruls pushing universal school education have no freaking idea about economics. They think that paying for people to learn to read and write will somehow make farmers more effective and won't result in a bunch of extra taxes on my hard-earned money. Now, where's my slave whip?

          • Fuck off.
            Face reality: You're going to have to WORK FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Get over it. No free ride for you. Suck it up.
            • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

              Face reality: You're going to have to WORK FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Get over it. No free ride for you. Suck it up.

              This is a total non-sequitur (it's also wrong, I can retire fairly comfortably right now). How is it linked with Conservatism?

              Throughout the US history Conservatives have been consistently on the side of oppression and ignorance.

  • at least for the duration of the pandemic. If we pull support before the virus is under control everything'll go to shit really fast. Especially in a country as heavily armed as Americans.
    • Re:It better (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kqs ( 1038910 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:55PM (#60305701)

      Bah, I always hear that "We can't close all bars, 2A folks will stop that!" "We can't make people wear masks, 2A folks will object!" Yeah, a few will object, and everyone will see them as they really are: whiny entitled idiots in line at CostCo.

      What's funny is that the theoretical reason for 2A is to stop the government when it starts attacking and killing citizens. But those same folk had no complaints when troops attacked non-violent protesters in DC so Trump could get a photo op. They have no complaints when federal agents are arresting protesters in Portland (ignoring the objections of the state and local officials, "states rights" is another lie). The government does literally (and I mean "literally") the exact claimed reason for the 2A and many gun owners are like "nope, seems fine to me, I love authoritarianism as long as it's directed at other people. Which makes me a patriot!"

      I really want to respect other opinions, but some people make that very very hard.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I'd love to see the 2A guys show up to a BLM protest and keep the cops a respectful distance away. You know, like a proper militia, there to protect the people from the government.

      • (ignoring the objections of the state and local officials, "states rights" is another lie). The government does literally (and I mean "literally") the exact claimed reason for the 2A and many gun owners are like "nope, seems fine to me, I love authoritarianism as long as it's directed at other people. Which makes me a patriot!"

        There was a perfect example of that not long after the election. An American woman who is married to a Mexican man without legal immigration status. He was caught in one of Trump's ICE raids and deported. Reporters interviewed her and when it came out that she was a fairly ardent Trump supporter, they asked the obvious question about why she voted for someone so vocal about deporting illegal immigrants when her own husband was one. I'm paraphrasing from memory of course but the response was pretty much

    • Hey! Could you please stop being so selfish for a single moment and think about your fellow human? We here in Europe are actually waiting for this! Don't spoil our fun!

  • by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @08:51PM (#60305687)

    If you really wanted to use the power of government to control the distribution of wealth this way...simply prohibit anyone with a net worth of more than $5M from holding any position in any company or any government anywhere.

    Once you reach that threshold, you're stuck increasing your wealth through investments and royalties. You can't work, can't consult, can't advise, in exchange for any compensation whatsoever. You have to make way for someone else to take those jobs. Announce today, effective in 5 years so replacement plans can be put into place.

    Good luck, and back the fuck up.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      Then go look at an Indian Reservation.

      -jcr

      So? Please explain your logical process that sees drunken natives as evidence for economic policy in a California valley town .
      I could use a laugh.

  • "This country has a history of finding ways to pay for things that we say matter."

    No, we don't. We pay for them, and then borrow money to pay for it, because we are stupid and lack any ability to delay gratification.

    Note that we are - quite literally - the wealthiest society that has ever existed in human history, and yet we still borrow 1/4-1/5 of our annual spending, because we STILL can't afford everything we want.

  • If you give $500 to a person who is poor, it's all going to be spent and circulate thru the economy a half dozen or more times creating a lot of economic activity.

    If you give $500 to a wealthy person- it will vanish- most likely into some kind of bonds which require the rest of the population to pay higher prices or higher taxes.

    If you want to protect the economy, give aid at the bottom. You will probably get every penny of the money back in taxes on the economic activity it generates.

    • I like this observation by Will Rogers, appropriate to your post...

      (Talking about Hoover): "But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows hands." ...and, I found this, appropriate to the topic...

      "The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know t

  • before we see Universal Basic Income. The Righties would rather see random blood spilled in the streets than give someone a penny. They'd spend BILLIONS to avoid giving out Thousands.
  • Basic income means you have to eliminate the minimum wage. There is no need for "a living wage" with basic income. Minimum was was never meant to be a living wage in the first place. It's what you pay the kid that is in high school and knows nothing. This is a way for them to get experience.

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